Dwarkesh Podcast - Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

New episode with military historian Si Sheppard.The conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires might be the most shocking events in human history.Hernan Cortés and some hundreds of Conquistadors landed on a new continent they knew basically nothing about, and within 2 and a half years, conquered the 6 million strong Aztec empire.Then, a decade later, Francisco Pizarro did the same thing to an Incan Empire of some 10 million inhabitants.In both cases, the Conquistadors consistently beat native armies while being literally 100x (or even in some cases 1000x) outnumbered - and in many cases, did so without taking a single casualty.And they did this with 99% of their military forces being made up of the very natives they were trying to subjugate.We often forget how wild human history is. People talk about AI takeover as if it would be some crazy, unprecedented sci-fi outcome. But this would not be the first time an alien force whose motives the defenders barely understand use more advanced technology and diplomatic cunning to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and long established existing order.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Jane Street’s intern projects are even more ambitious than I realized. One intern spent his summer researching LLM memorization, figuring out how to quantify and reduce it. This matters because, when Jane Street tests their models on historical data, they need to know that performance reflects predictive power, not just memorized outcomes. Another intern spent his time developing a new activation checkpointing scheme: his custom version ended up outperforming PyTorch’s native one. If you want to read about more 2026 intern projects or apply for Jane Street’s 2027 internships, go to janestreet.com/dwarkesh* Grok Bot can tackle the tasks you’ve been meaning to handle but just haven’t gotten around to. For example, SpaceXAI recently gave Grok Bot access to their procurement contracts, vendor spend, and usage data: it ended up identifying over $100,000 in potential savings for them. I decided to try this on my own spend, and Grok Bot found over $5,000 of savings for me, even though I run a pretty small team. Try it out yourself at x.ai/bot* Antithesis solves one of the biggest problems with traditional software testing: to test for a bug, you first have to be able to imagine it. Antithesis runs your system through thousands of parallel histories and steers your tests for you, injecting faults and generally trying to make everything as adversarial as possible. That way, your software gets tested against scenarios you’d never imagine but that could still arise in the real world. Learn more at antithesis.com/dwarkeshTimestamps(00:00:00) – Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs(00:22:39) – Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca(00:26:59) – Explaining Conquistador military superiority(00:34:39) – Could the natives have beat the Conquistadors?(00:48:56) – The Aztecs and Incas did not get to learn from each other(00:56:11) – Why Spain still lost in the long run(01:07:47) – Why didn’t the Aztecs/Incas adapt better to European warfare?(01:14:16) – Conquistador motivation(01:26:22) – Why Mughal India also couldn’t play the Europeans off each other(01:33:42) – Diplomacy was just as important as technology This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com

Okay, today I'm chatting with professor and military historian, Cy Sheppard. I want to talk to you about the conquest of the ASTIC and the Inca empires, because these are some of the most shocking events in human history, unparalleled among all the military and diplomatic achievements ever made. You have a few hundred conquistadors show up to a new continent they know nothing about, and within a matter of years, they subjugate empires, which have millions of inhabitants in them. In the process of doing so, they are often. often winning battles where they are outnumbered 100 X to 1,000 X to 1, and in many cases

not even taking a single casualty. They're doing this while upwards of 99% of their fighting forces are made up of the very natives that they're going to subjugate. And I wanted to have you on to talk about this episode. We're not going to focus on it. We're mostly talking about history here, but people think of AI takeover as this crazy sci-fi scenario. But this would not be the first time in history that an alien force with motivation

that the natives don't understand is able to use diplomatic cunning and technological advantages to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and well-established order. And so I wanted to have you on to understand what happened here. So first, I would love to hear the stories of what did Cortez do, what did Pizarro do, how did these conquests actually go down. Okay. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. And yes, we're talking about the birth of our modern world, which played out between 600 to 500 years ago and created the modern globalized community that we all participate in today. It began in the 15th century when Europe backed up against the wall of the Atlantic, under immense pressure from external forces, and cut off from the core economic power bases of the east,

the sources of the spice and silk that had driven the global economy historically throughout Eurasia, are finally forced to innovate. Key names like Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, work on turning the Atlantic Ocean from a barrier into a superhighway. Generational knowledge accrued from captains reporting in on tides and wind currents and whatever land they've managed to reconnoiter, building out the map as they go along, are able to find a way around the south tip of Africa directly to India and therefore cut out the middlemen. In Spanish, meanwhile, they're heading west.

We honored the story of Christopher Columbus in 1492. He sailed the sea blue. That was entrepreneurship. This was an expedition to arrive at the Oriental markets by traveling west. Of course, his figures were completely wrong, and he was saved by the fact that unknown to him, there was an entire continent in the place where he thought Japan, China, the Spice Islands would be. Initially, that was perceived ironically as a disappointment. But over time, it became increasingly apparent. This was a source of potential in land, in wealth, and in people that could be exploited.

A key turning point happened in 1511. when a Spanish ambitious nobleman seizes control of Cuba, de Velazquez. He sends out from this power base expeditions exploring the coast of what we would call Mesoamerica, Central America. Later in 1518, he assigns that task to a man who he's had a somewhat tempestuous relationship with, a man named Hernan Cortez. He'd arrived in the New World in Cuba in 1511. He had some. He had some of a somewhat tempestuous relationship with, a man named in the New World in Cuba in 1511. He had some legal training, so he served as a notary and worked his way up to being Alcalde, which is chief magistrate on Cuba, but he had much greater ambition.

And he takes this warrant from the governor and runs with it. He begins recruiting men to a much wider and much more ambitious goal, not just to explore the coast, but to penetrate into the interior, to find out what they're at a cease control of him. When the governor realizes what Cortez is up to, He tries to stop him. This great moment on 18th November 1518. He arrives at the waterfront just as Cortez gets into a boat to go out to his ships offshore. And the governor calls out to him, what are you up to? And Cortez assures him, don't worry.

I had this all into control. But of course, the governor had lost control at that point. Now it was Cortez's expedition. So this is the background. And again, as you say, he is literally going off the side of the map. He's entering terra incognita, unknown to Europeans previously. His political antenna, honed by years in the islands, enables him to appreciate at a very early stage that there is a significant imperial power which has hegemony here in the mainland, and that it's subject peoples chaf under the authority of whoever this lord or imperial power is. He arrives in the lands of the Totonaks, who had recently been incorporated into the imperial orbit of a people who call themselves the Meika, hence Meiko,

as we know it, but have come down to history based on their mythical origins in a land called Aslan as the Aztecs. So, for simplicity's sake, that's what we'll refer to them as. The Totonax resented this authority, as all subjugated and subordinated peoples do. And they saw the arrival of these outsiders as a potential opportunity to throw off the authority that had been imposed on them. So having established this relationship with the Totonax, Cortez begins to march inland. and he enters the territory of the Lashkarlens, who, like, an autoimmune system immediately rallied to defeat him, to expel him from their territory. But he fights him to a standstill for such a period of time. The Lashkarlans, and he arrive at a new kind of arrangement. The

Lashkarlans, again, appreciate his strength, his power, as potential. They swing over to his side will then his forwards serve as guides and reinforcements for his expedition deeper into the interior. Can we pause here and talk about the numbers? So how many men had Cortez brought with him? Even the Talascha Collins had much larger numbers than Cortez did. So even the standstill is an impressive military achievement, especially because he's fighting without native support. So what are the numbers even at this point? A few hundred on Cortez's side and multiple thousands on the Lesh Collins side. It's at this point that the critical technological differentials from the older and new world really began to come into effect. The classic text, which got me invested

in this whole scenario in the first place, is Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. He enumerates in the title, those critical advantages that the Spaniards had. Guns in reality weren't so significant. Once the Native People got over the shock value, they appreciated given the very slow reloading times involved in firearms at that time, that they weren't so significant as assets on the battlefield. But steel was critical. Local weapons were carved from wood and from stone and from obsidian, that volcanic glass,

which is razor sharp when honed to a point and quite dangerous as a slashing weapon, but against the steel armor and especially the steel helmets that the conquistadors were wearing, it was much less effective. And the conquistadors were drawing on military traditions of the old world that went back, incorporating long Toledo steel sword blades. They used those as thrusting weapons to take out indigenous warriors who were coming in with cut and slash weapons, which of course open up the side of the body to be taken out. very early. So the combination of the technology with generations of inherited military training

and skill meant that the conquistos had that critical edge on the battlefield. Now, they weren't invincible, and Cortez again playing those mind games. He was taking casualties, and he was careful to bury his dead underneath the houses that they were sheltering in, so the Lashkarlans wouldn't be aware that they were even having some successes in hand-to-hand combat. It was as much a mind game as a physical game. And the ultimate weapon, of course, the conquistos brought with them was their horses. I cannot emphasize or over-emphasize enough how vital the horse was to the conquistadors once they entered into the interior of the American continents. They had the external asset, they had sail power, which enabled them to land anywhere they wanted on the coast, but in the

interior, the horse was decisive. There were no native equivalence. The horse originated in North America, but it had subsequently died out. And the local peoples had, not just no horses, but no beast of burden generally. That was not integrated into their economies, into their ways of life, or into their military. The Inca, who we'll discuss in a moment, they did have one, which was the llama, and when they campaigned, their armies trailing for miles behind them would be these endless baggage trains of pack animals, llamas. The Aztecs had no equivalent. Their only domestic animals were the turkey and the chihuahua. And speaking of dogs, the conquistros also bought these big war mastiffs, these fighting dogs,

fighting dogs which wore armor and were trained to take down men. Again, imagine the terrifying impact that would have for the indigenous people. But the horse was the critical asset. On attack, you could blast through any native formation, which didn't not just have the weapons, but the training or discipline to be able to stand up to mass-shocked cavalry. And if things were going bad for the conquistadors, they could retreat much faster than, of course, the enemies could chase them. So Los Chalans appreciate all these assets coming together, and they see this as their opportunity.

They were the holdouts, the last remaining major entity. in Mesoamerica, which was still able to go toe to toe with the Aztecs. They've been completely surrounded. The Aztecs were upping the ante every year with these ceremonial flower wars, which are becoming more and more obviously wars of conquest. And the Lushkalans have been cut off from the coast and from sources of salt, right? So they were being pushed to the brink. This is a hail merry for them. If we ally with these outsiders, these strangers who are just few in number, after all, we may have some potential way to break out of this strategic trap that we've been, we've had imposed upon us. So they,

lean over to the size of Cortez and they travel with him to Tenochtitlan, the capital, the glittering jewel in the midst of Lake Tishkoca, the capital of the Aztec Empire. And again, there's a dramatic moment when Cortez passes through the causeways out into the city and encounters Moctezuma II. The Huey Latawani, as he was called the great speaker, the emperor of the Aztec Empire. And these two worlds come together at that moment. The interface between them was Cortez's interpreter slash mistress, Donna Marina, Melinche, as she became known, who is translating from one side to the other. So the dialogue that occurs then is one of those great tipping points in history. What was the perspective of Moctezuma II? He was aware Cortez was coming. This is his

empire. He has envoys and emissaries and scouts and spies everywhere. And they're reporting back to him that something has washed up on the shores of our empire and it is determined to meet with us. He initially bargains with Cortez, urging him to leave. He provides him with precious gifts, which of course just inflames Cortez even more. And just once he's got hold of Aztec gold, he's just determined to go all the way to the center. So he continues playing this double game. His advisors, his counsel, urge him not to allow Cortez to proceed to the capital. His own brother, Kuitla Huac, tells him, if you allow this man inside your house, he will take your house away from you.

But Moctozuma proceed. And from that, he's been condemned by generations of historians, right? This was a mistake to bring the conquistadors into the heart of the empire itself. I actually think that was his best option, whether he was aware of or not, because it was better for him to have Cortez, as his guest, within Tenoshtitla, than it was to have Cortez this random element at loose within his empire, talking to the subject peoples, inflaming them possibly against central authority. He felt perhaps Cortez was what he said he was, an envoy from a great emperor on the far side of the vast, ocean. Cortez, again with the mind games, had no warrant to say he was a diplomat or ambassador for anybody. He kept telling anyone who'd listen, I speak for the mighty Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Of course, Charles V had no idea who Hunan Cortez was. Cortez, again, it's just winging it.

The incredible improvisation here. And for a moment, the stasis, the great turning point comes when word arrives from the coast that one of the Aztec regional military officers, on his own initiative, has taken action against the conquistadors left behind on the coast, the ones with the Tottenax, and some of them have been killed. Cortez sees this as his pretext. He marches into the palace of Mokthusa II, the Aztec Qa Latuani, tells him that for his own safety, he was now being taken under the protective custody of the Spanish, and he should come with him or else there will be violence.

And this is the moment when Moktizuma's entire worldview just collapses, right? nobody had spoken to him like this before. His psychology just disintegrates at that point. He meekly allows himself to be led away. He tells his people, don't resist. I don't want bloodshed. I will pass with these strangers. And then, once Cortez is rounded up, the officers at the coast responsible for turning on his men there, he has them in front of the emperor and the entire court burned alive, which is a form of punishment, totally unknown to the Aztecs. And they watch this in grim silence. So once Cortez has seized the emperor himself, once he has Mokhtazuma. He already has the empire. He governs through

what is increasingly becoming his puppet. And Moktizuma seems to have fallen almost under the spell of Cortez, the classic Stockholm syndrome. He gives him a grand tour of the city. Cortez, and again subtle flax on his power has brigantines, small sailing boats built, and he takes Moktizuma with them on a sailing cruise on Lake Tishoko. And the emperor is astonished at this new technology of using the when to sail on the water. Having the emperor was the key. So the emperor's mistake wasn't inviting Cortez into the city. It was making himself vulnerable by staying there also in an adjacent palace. If he had gone to some further location, made some excuse, a pilgrimage or an expedition of some kind, and it ruled through subordinates, Cortez would have been baffled.

He couldn't go chasing after the emperor. That would be obviously too provocative. But without the emperor there, Cortez would have had. had his options extremely limited. And I don't know what he would have done in that circumstance. But because Mokhtazuma stayed in his capital, he made himself the target. Once he was taken, this was the key to controlling the entire empire at that point. So obviously the story continues from there. La Noceitris de, where people might not appreciate about what happened here in both the Pizarro story

of the Inka Empire, which we'll talk about later, and in the Aztec story, is that in both cases, the Spanish were themselves divided and, in fact, fight. each other. So maybe you should tell the story how Velasca sends this another expedition to go capture and arrest Cortez for going beyond the prerogative of his mission. Absolutely. This is, we left the governor on Cuba, of course, fuming. He rallies another expeditionary force because Cortez is stealing his thunder, right? And he sends us under Pfei Alde de Nevaez, a larger force than the one Cortez bought with him originally. This lands on the coast. Cortez appreciates he has to move. So he leaves one of his subordinates,

the hot blood of D'Alvarado behind in charge in Tornashitland, takes as many men as he can to the coast, confronts DeVayas defeats him in a minor battle, and again, the diplomacy wins over the entire expeditionary force that the governor had dispatched. He tells them, my friends, why are we fighting? We have the empire at my disposal, join with me, and we can share in the riches. So he wins over the vast majority of this new force. It becomes effectively reimbled. enforcement, marches back to the Capitol. He finds the mooters turned against him. The problem with not being in charge is you can't be everywhere and his subordinate, assuming that the Aztecs were mobilizing against him, instead of a preemptive strike. There was a festival, the aristocracy,

particularly the warrior cast, were celebrating, and Alvarado just descended on them, massacred everybody. The survivors rally the population, and when Cortez returns, he finds himself, in fact, they'll be under siege. The people are so appalled now with the failure of their Huey Latowani. When he tries to pacify them, they throw stones at him, mortally wounded. He either dies or the Spanish finish him off because he's no longer any use to them. So now Cortez is trapped in the city in Tenochtitland. He determines to break out, and that is, he's to say, La Nonche Trieste, the tragic night, because so many of his men are left behind. They're either kills. They try to escape the city across the causeways, were forced to

retreat back to the palaces, and they're taken alive and sacrificed subsequently. Cortez gets away with a minority of the troops still at his disposal and makes it back to Lashkalan territory. That was the critical aspect, the two features of the entire campaign. One, he has enough strike power with enough horses to defeat the Aztecs when they try to finish him off, the Battle of Othumbo. They feel he's on the run.

They have the numbers. The conquistadors dragging their tails between their legs as they flee. Cortez himself is grievously wounded. We can finish them off. And they had the numbers. They were winning, but again, Cortez identifies where the Aztec general is.

He rallies enough horsemen to blast through the Aztec ranks and take out their command and control. The Aztec army disintegrates and the Spanish are able to flee. So the battlefield of bondages, they had their horses, their steel, critical. But just as critical was the diplomacy. If the Lesch Collins had turned on Cortez at that point, he would have been finished. Not one Spaniard would have survived. None of them would have made it back to the coast. But the Lesh Collins see, for their own reasons, not out of any generosity or humanitarian

impulse to welcome back the conquistadors. They still see we are committed to these people and to our alliance. So they give Cortez shelter. He recovers physically, begins to rebuild his strength, and is determined to go back to Tenochtitland, and for round two, and this time, we're not going to be indulging diplomatic niceties. The Lashkalans, their own perspective on this, if you go to Lashkala, the territory today, the governor's mansion there has murals on the wall, and these depict the Cortez and the conquistadors from the Lashkarlon point of view. And it's fascinating to look at how the relationship is not between a superior and an inferior. It's between equals.

You see them depicted in the same scale, engaged in diplomacy between partners, not between subordinates and dominant figures. The Lashkarlans drove a hard bargain. We want territory carved out of the Aztecs. We want our own fortress in Tonnash-Titland after this is over. They saw this as them using the conquistadors, not the last. the way around, which is very important to bear in mind, that the Aztec Empire from a distance, if you look at a map, seemed impressive. But this was an imperial construct and not just the remaining independent entities, like the Lashkarlans, like the Taraskins, who we can discuss later,

were hostile to the Aztecs. So were so many of their subordinated peoples. The Totonaks in the coast, the Chalco states on the shores of Lake Tishko. They chafed under Aztec hegemony and authority. And they too saw the conquistadors as an opportunity to finally shrug off the authority, the demands of the Aztecs and get revenge in a lot of ways. So as Cortez builds up for the final campaign against Tenochteland, against the new Huey Latawani, Kuwaitla Huac, and then after he died his brother, the last of the Huey Latawanis, Kautomak, He has indigenous people flocking to his banner from all over Mesoamerica. He's emphasized that he's still in the fight.

He still has those advantages. More reinforcements are arriving at the coast, and they're being integrated into the Conquistador army. But the force that marches on Tenos Teetland, the total numbers, the conquistadors were maybe one half of one percent in raw numbers of that force. The overwhelming majority were other Mesoamerican peoples who see this as their final reckoning with the Aztecs. And this is the integration, again, of the technology with the diplomacy. Cortier's knows to take the city, he has to control the lake. Again, the innovations,

they need sulfur for their gunpowder. They have guns, useless without gunpowder. So an expedition goes into the mountains to the volcano, Poppacetapetal, and they dangle with ropes inside the caldera of the volcano scooping out the sulfur they need as the critical ingredient for their gunpowder. Another one builds prefabricated brigantine's boats in their different sections and then has untold numbers of porters, human load bearers, bring these prefabricated pieces over the mountains to the lake. They're assembled, and then they're loose in the lake, and then now they have control over the lake. So bringing together the technology, the innovations with the local manpower, and this is the force directed against Tenocht Land in the final battle. I actually didn't know those stories. That's crazy.

One of the ways in which, to the extent people are even aware of the story, they might not understand what actually happened, is they have this model of the Aztecs or the Incas as this cohesive single nation. And I think a better model might be something like, imagine if it's Russia and Ukraine have been doing trench warfare for a hundred years. And imagine the animosity. And then also the Russians are like taking tens of thousands of Ukrainians and like doing human sacrifices with them. and then if some foreign force comes in and says to the Ukrainians, we can help you march into Moscow, I think they'd have a pretty decent odds of getting some agreement there. Absolutely.

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There's so many interesting questions to ask from everything from technology to diplomacy to disease to tactics. Before you get to that, I think just to round out the story, in many ways, what's striking about the conquest of the Incas in Peru under Pizarro 10 years later is how similar it was to Cortez's story, how much he just basically followed the playbook. But I want to just people to have a sense of roughly what happened here. starting, I think maybe with a battle of Cajara Marca might be the most astonishing military lopsided encounter that has maybe ever happened in human history.

So I would, yeah, if you can recapitulate a bit of the, at least that battle, and then just the overall story, and then we can do some analysis from there. Absolutely. When Cortez consummates his conquest of Tenerish Tithan in 1521, the last of the Hewai that when he surrenders to him and how he occupies, the territory and most importantly, the top of the social hierarchy. The existing structure, as much as possible, is allowed to persist. The conquistos just decapitate the local nobility and insert themselves at the top. Now, this is the playbook that will continue to be applied. Less successfully throughout the rest

of Mesoamerica, because the existing political entities, they aren't so sophisticated, man. Nonetheless, there are rumors, there are always rumors of lost cities of gold, and more conquistos are now flooding into the new world to seek advantage of this. One of this is a distant cousin of Cortez, named Francisco Pizarro. He met with Cortez and got the playbook, as you say, about how this is to be done. And then, again, in one of these conquistial business ventures, he finds the funding for men and ships and begins pushing south down the west coast of South America, crossing the equator and finally arriving in what is now modern-day Peru. And he encounters what he's looking for, a sophisticated culture on the scale, in fact, in terms of territory on a much broader scale,

than Cortez had encountered in Mesoamerica. This is the land of the Inca. When he arrived, there was civil war. The previous Sapa Inca, Wainak, had died in 1525, and his two sons, Adahualpa and Huasca, turned on each other. Adahualpa had just won the civil war. He was proceeding to Kuzko, the Inca capital, to be formally enthroned as the new Sapa Inca.

And that's when word arise to him, that strangers have entered his realm. And again, we're talking 168 men. pushed into the Andes Mountains and are seeking him out for reasons unknown. He encounters him outside a place called, as you say, Kajumaka in 1532. And he seized not threat but opportunity. And just like Mokhtizuma II had been advised to not treat with this people, so does Adahualpa's envoy who reports to them,

these are not men of good faith. We can take them out. They tend to sleep together. At night, we can set fire to wherever they're staying and just take them all out in one fell swoop. But Adahualpa is interested in what they have to offer him. He's seen the horses. He's seen, in fact, Pizarro made a specific case of impressing the Sapa Inka with his horses. He sends one of his key lie lieutenants to put on a display of horsemanship. And famously, he charges right at the Sapa Inker and all his court. And the horse stops just inches from Adolpah's face, snorting and breathing. And Adolper is absolutely stony face and professes to be unimpressed.

and says, I will meet with your master at a time of my choosing. After the Spaniards leave, he has all of his court, including his generals, who flinched or showed fear, executed just to make the point that were not to be intimidated by these people. He sends a blocking force, tens of thousands of men, to cut off any retreat, and then he proceeds to meet with Pizarro at Kajumaka with the vast expanse of his army.

There's a saying in Peru that Adahua was planning to have Pizarro for lunch, but Pizarro ended up having him for breakfast. Once he enters into the confines of a narrow, constricted courtyard space, that's when Pizarro lets off the ambush. He lets fly with all his artillery and all his musketry for the shock value, unleashes his horses. And the Idaho himself is overwhelmed and taken prisoner at that point. So this, again, is the playbook, the copybook, as you say.

Go to the top. Sees whoever is at the very pinnacle of the social hierarchy. You control the entire structure. And just so people know the numbers there, the Inca Empire overall has some 10 million inhabitants. During this first battle where Pizarro encounters the emperor, he has some 160, 190 conquistadors. I think the numbers are unknown for exactly how many Al-Wapa had,

but he's facing off the army that has just basically clinched the civil war in the Inca Empire and is around tens of thousands of big, I've seen some numbers that are like 100,000 or 200,000. but certainly in the high tens of thousands big. So 100-something against almost 100,000. That's the first battle. What is astonishing is that these 100 conquistadors, I think, I saw some numbers that are like,

they killed like 10,000 of the enemy or at least thousands of Ottawa's troops. They suffer zero casualties. So they kill close to 10,000 of the enemy. They suffer zero casualties. This is the first encounter that the Inca Empire has ever had with the Conquistadors. I think that must have been shocking from both sides' perspective.

And I want, if you can do some analysis here, how is it possible? How can you have an outcome, a military outcome, where you can have literally a KD ratio of infinity, of, you know, 10,000 to zero? Yeah. The conquistos themselves admitted the night before that encounter, there were so many campfires from the Inca army scattered across the hills surrounding. in Kajamaika, it looked like the twinkling of stars at night. And the conquistos themselves admitted when they saw the number of Inca troops filing into this courtyard,

they were losing control of their own bladders out of fear, right? They knew what the risks were here. But the shock value of that initial impetus was enough to carry them through. The Inca had never heard gunpowder weapons fired in any format before. The ancestral founder of their empire was Pachikudi, which means the, the, thunder variant, but to see a real-world exemplar that must have been just beyond shocking. So the actual physical damage that the cannons and Hacobus is inflicted was forthly minor, but the explosion and the fact that these strangers seem to be able to control the thunder must have been psychologically devastating.

And then it came down again to that steel and those horses. When Pizarro unleashed the horses, this is something that the anchor, as you say, these are veteran warriors, the winners of a civil war, strategists and at a tactical level within the framework of pre-Columbian Andean warfare. They were the top dogs. But this is something outside of their entire understanding of the universe. They'd never seen a horse before or knew what it could do. If you integrate a rider into the saddle with stirrups and the shock value of that charge,

they had no doctrine to push back against that. And the psychological impact was that they tried to flee, they were piling up against the walls and their desperation to scramble over them to the point where the walls finally gave way under the press of all those bodies. Some of them escaped into the countryside, and the Spanias rode after them, just running them down as they fled. And the only thing that stopped the massacre at the end was night was falling, and the Spaniards in darkness couldn't continue to pursue any longer. So it's what happens when something totally outside the universe of even veteran warriors plays out in a way that they have no mental appreciation of or able to draw back in any kind of library of how do I respond in this situation. the fight or flight instinct just completely takes over, and the flight was the winner in this instance.

As you say, the only casualty was Pizarro himself. He's reaching for Adahuelpa to take him prisoner, and one of his more enthusiastic comrades slashing and manages to cut his hand as he does that. That was the only injury, any of the conquistos suffered at this critical moment. Yeah. So give me a sense of how is it that you can have, even if they're on horses, how is it that they're just so impenetrable? It's like if you have a hundred, I guess intuitively you would think, if you have tens of thousands of troops, can't you just swarm a cavalry and many of them will die,

but just, you know, pull that guy in a steel armor off the stirrups and take him down and then just kill him? Europeans knew how to do that. The Swiss, for example, had already proved

that a mounted knight could be knocked out of the saddle and defeated. If you have men, shoulder to shoulder, locked in place with long pikes to keep those horses at a distance

and break up the impetus of their charge. But that requires, one, the technology, and two, the discipline, training, and institutional knowledge to do that. Mesoamerican warfare was very loose in its formation. Warriors would have a lot of space between them, which is the worst thing that you can do in regards to cavalry because the horses can take advantage of that looseness to just blast to any formation that is coming at them. Now, one depiction of the pre-Columbian societies is that they were somehow childlike, innocent, and couldn't, responded. They did try to, and it's important to bear that in mind. At every level, both the

Aztec and the Inca sought to put in place countermeasures to negate the advantages of the conquist it was had. One of the critical exemplars is confined space. The Aztecs, when the Cortez showed up in 1521 for round two, by drawing them into their city, which was a network of islands connected by bridges and causeways, that minimized the advantages of the horses, because that's not good horse country. They would learn to fight from rooftops and pelt the enemy with stones or whatever whether they could from heights. They built man-sized holes in buildings so they could slip from one to the other where the horses couldn't chase them. So they learned to use those kind of advantages. They learned the stopping power of water. Interestingly, both completely underconnected. They had no

relationship with each other. But against Cortez, when he was taking one of the smaller cities on Lake Tishko, it's La Palpa. The Aztecs broke the dikes in the lake. and flooded the city, which took out a number of the conquistadors and their allies. In that environment, of course, the metal armor works to the disadvantage of the conquistador. It drags them to the bottom. If they waited until nightfall, when the Spaniards were sleeping, they might have bagged all of them. And so the Inca, too, later, when the Conquistadors moved on Alley-Tentambo, again, the Inca flooded the river.

They allowed it to burst its banks and again bogged down the Conquistador cavalry, so that they were adapting. They took, captured enemy weapons. They learned to fix conquistador swords to the end of long wooden poles, improvising pike tactics. Again, without being instructed to, they're just intuitive that keeping horses at a distance with long spears would be a way to negate the advantages that they had.

They Inker employed the bolas, which they'd used for hunting, the great birds of South America, to tangle the legs of horses. One famous incident, an Aztec warrior allowed himself, to be speared by a conquistador and gripped hold of the spear, the lance, as it was in his body, fixing the conquistador in place so his supporters, his colleagues, could swarm and take him out of the saddle. So they were trying to improvise. The Aztecs, with their captured Spanish prisoners, used them to learn how to use captured crossbows.

The Inca, when they captured Spaniards, would use them to give instruction on how to use these firearms. And Manco Inca, the leader of the Inker resistance, made a point of, of learning to ride a horse himself, to demonstrate to his people that we can do this. So they were trying, but the learning curve was so steep and the timeframe to internalize foreign technology and foreign tactics was too short for them to really be able to deploy it to their advantage.

And this is worth emphasizing. Cortez takes over the ASEC empire in what is now Mexico in two and a half years. So a couple hundred men, an empire of six million people, two and a half years. Pizar does the same thing for the Inka Empire 10 years later in about five years. So it's insane how fast these conquests happened and just how little time that the,

even though in principle they could have figured out ways in which to combat cavalry and things, just how little time they had to adapt all the while their whole social structures disintegrating, there's disease, et cetera. There's all this like psychological shock value. Now the obvious question to ask at this point before we go to other ones is if you reran the simulation and again and again, if you just change a few things here and there, change the leader, change the leader, change the, change the leader for both the Aztecs or for the Spanish in these conquests.

And what fraction of the simulation do, within a matter of a few years later, the Spanish end up in control of these empires anyways? Because when you first learn about them, it actually sounds like an outrageous and impossible outcome that a few hundred men would take over empires of millions of people. And when you learn more about it, then you begin to think, well, I guess it couldn't have been any other way. But I don't know if that is your opinion. There are the grand scheme of things. There are multiple wheels that define history. The grand wheels that grind slowly, geography and climate. And then the small wheels in the foreground are the individuals, the key players themselves. And this is an integration of that process, the big wheels

with the small ones. Yes, if Cortez, which could have happened on multiple occasions, have been taken out early, the conquistadors, leaderless, rudderless, may well have disintegrated, and the conquest may have been aborted at that level. Pizarro, again, Adda Huolpa's critical mistake, was inserting himself into Pizarro's trap. If he had sent envoys to keep the negotiations at a distance, he may have been able to frustrate Pizarro's ambitions. And as the head of what remained, an integrated Inca empire, he may have been able to use those numbers to win the campaign in the short term.

When the Inca did finally turn on the conquistadors, Francesco Pizarro has seized Cusco, he stripped the temples of their gold and silver, the sweat of the sun and the tears of the moon, as it was called, shipped it back to Europe. He goes back to the coast to set up Lima, what would become the city of Lima, the modern capital of Peru. The danger with Kusko is the fact it's elevated and away from the coast, which is where the Spanish of course, with their absolute monopoly over naval power, have the advantage. His problem was he left his half-brothers in charge back in Kuzko, and they provoke Manco Inca, who've been set up Spararo's puppet ruler, into outright rebellion. He rallies his people. He lays siege to Kuzko. He takes

Saxe-Human, the great fortress that dominates Kuzko. And he has one of his generals, Kuiso Yupankui, cut off reinforcements arriving from the coast. The Inca could win sit peace confrontations if they used their terrain and their knowledge of it to their advantage. Pizarro from Lima on the coast is taking reinforcements and pushing them into the interior to relieve Kuzko. And Kuiso is waiting until they enter narrow defiles and passes through the mountains, blocking both ends, and then using boulders and other materials to just obliterate them from the heights.

And more and more of these Spanish expeditions are being annihilated. So at that level, when they use the terrain and their institutional knowledge of it to their advantage, the Inca are able to win Siet peace battles, but they can't steal the deal in Kuzko. And Manco makes the mistake of ordering Cuizzo to attack Lima.

He feels, we have the advantage now, We've bottled them up in Kuzco, we've annihilated their relief columns, take out their city on the coast and the problem's over. But attacking Lima meant passing across open ground, which made the Spanish then unleashed their advantage, the general is killed and the whole assault collapses. Back in Kuzko, yes, there's a handful of Spaniards hold up in just a couple of fortified buildings, desperately holding on. Day and night, they're under assault, the psychological aspect to it, the beating of drums and

the chanting and the constant rain of missiles to set their building on fire. They would have been wiped out except for two reasons. One, the open courtyards and plazas of Kuzko are good terrain for cavalry and they still have their horses. And secondly, again, critically, the asset through diplomacy of the local peoples, the subordinated mitmires they were called, or Yanukonah, serfs, the defeated and subordinated people of the Inc had bought forcibly within their imperial structure, chafing under those authorities, see these outsiders as their chance to finally break

free of Inca authority. So strangely enough, as it may seem, more local peoples had kept joining the besieged Spaniards during the whole battle of Cusco, which played out over many, many months. And the Spaniards end up with more allies, and they started during this battle, because there were so many people within the Inca Empire, from the Canarii, who were from Ecuador to the Chachapoya, from the Amazon basin, to even the Iamako, who used to be rivals with the Inca for control of Cusco itself. increasingly side with the Spaniards. And that local manpower was the critical asset.

Without that, they would have been wiped out at Kuska. So again, it's the Spaniards inserting themselves into an imperial orbit, which from a distance looks impressive with this geographic expanse and its total population, but which have been ruthlessly dictated to by a tiny elite of a hierarchy who had imposed themselves over the entire system. Remember, only a small number of people spoke, Novatel, the imperial language of the Aztecs.

Only a small number spoke Kachua, the imperial language of the Inca themselves. It was the Inca Empire, but it was constructed from multiple, multiple different ethnicities. I mean, they saw their chance, they took it to side with the Spaniards. Yeah, it's worth of remembering that

the Asteris and the Inca's are themselves, sort of the equivalent to the Conquistadors in their own world, right? There's 100,000 or so actual Inca's, they're controlling an empire of 10 million people. So they are themselves an imperial force. Going back to the question then of how contingent these victories were, it kind of

sounds like you're saying they are contingent, right? Because if you're pointing out all these cases in which if things had gone slightly differently, the seas of Kuskoak would have worked, or Cortez would have been killed in battle and stuff. The ultimate factor to go around to those background forces, the great wheels that grind through history. Yeah, the geography and climate structure one other factor. The fact that Eurasia was so stacked with domesticable animals sheep, cows, goats, mules, pigs, and above all horses, and human interaction in biomes with those domesticated animals created the context for the evolution of contagious diseases, endemic or pandemic, that ripped back and forth through Eurasia and were familiar with all

their names. That never occurred in the new world. The people there had no acquired immunity to diseases such as the big one, smallpox, but beyond that, the whole galaxy, of communicable diseases that we're now familiar with as being universal. I think even if the Aztecs Inca had won the short-term proximate victories, the longer-term demographic crisis would have undermined the functional capacity of their societies to remain integrated and to resist much longer. The pressure within them from their subject peoples, as they felt the authority of their overlords beginning to weaken

would have led to their fragmentation. which is the overarching cycle of pre-Columbian societies generally. They're extremely impressive, in fact, more impressive when you consider the disadvantages they had to struggle with. Their pyramids were built not through the assistance of beasts of burden or even the wheel, but simply through pure manpower and the application of that to construct it. The subject peoples would have broken for freedom. We see the recurring cycle of Mesoamerican history, for example,

that when Cortez arrived, Tenorche-Titland was one of the greatest metropolis, perhaps, on earth, beautiful and rich and heavily populated. A hundred years later, if he'd arrived in 1619 as opposed to 1519, he would have found a swamp with moss-covered mounds and hills rising out of it. The parallel to that, of course, is Tewa Wakan, the previous great metropolis which dominated Mesoamerica. It rose, it expanded, it attracted a huge population, it overstressed its environment, and it collapsed. I think the Aztecs naturally would have gone the same way. So one way or another, the Spanish or even subliquate ways of European colonists would have entrenched themselves at the coast and would have perhaps more slowly pushed inland.

It's possible that you would see a more balanced relationship between the colonists and the indigenous peoples. But I think in the longer term, they all would have been folded into the grand European imperial framework. So we've gotten to the point now where if you have a computer-based task that a personal assistant could knock out in an hour, AI can probably just do it for you. AI has gotten more and more general over time, so these new AI assistants need much less hand-holding than they used to. For example, SpaceXAI gave GROCbot access to their contracts, vendor spend, and usage

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Go to X.a.i slash bot to try it out. We do know examples of other native forces who resist European powers for a very long time. I think there's some platoon or army that has just finished off fighting during the American Civil War that has to go down and then go fight some native tribes. Because there was still even late into the 19th century. You know, native forces were able to resist European incursions.

Of course, you know, with the Comanche and so forth. So it does seem to me that they, like, maybe just because they were so centralized, you get the emperor and the whole thing falls, and whereas other tribes were more dispersed. You're absolutely right. The key term there as you used it was dispersal. The vulnerability of the Aztec, the Inca, was that hierarchical nature in their society. And the absolute loyalty that the system had invested into who was at top of the hierarchical tree. The Huay Latawani for the Aztecs, the Sapa Inca, for the Inca themselves.

Taking that individual destabilizes the whole system, potentially even means that it can be functionally governed through the use of intermediaries or even puppets. The dispersed people, as you say, the Comanche, even the Maya in Mesoamerica, whose city states, jealously asserted and defended their autonomy against each other meant that the Spanish couldn't take out the Maya in one fell swoop. they couldn't do to the Maya, what they'd done to the Aztecs. They had to reduce their cities one by one. And it was a long, laborious process that took almost to the end of the 17th century to finally consummate.

Even then, there was still smoldering descent. In many ways, you can go to the highlands of Central America. And they still speak the ancestral languages of the first one before they speak Spanish. Yes, colonizing powers can find aggressive bite back. Just look at Custer's last stand, as late as 1876 here in America, the entire 7th the cavalry wiped out of the little bighorn because they lost the initiative. And at that point, they were fighting warriors who had come together temporarily, riding horses, firing guns, and then dispersing afterwards. It was very hard to pin them down. That was often a frustrating aspect.

It took a long process of what amounts to a really total war to finally bring them to heal, sitting up barbed wire everywhere and, of course, slaughtering the buffalo to take away the basis for their culture and their food chain to finally bring the last holdouts to heal. So it can be a long protracted process. The Inc. And Aztecs themselves found that out. They never consummated, even incorporating their entire zones within their empires. The Aztecs had surrounded and was slowly reducing the Lashkollins. But to the West, and what's Mikowaka and the Puripuche people,

or as they called today, the Taraskins, had an empire of their own. And they were able to go toe to toe with the Aztex. The first time the Aztecs crossed into Tarascan territory, it was a disaster. A key reason for that was actually technology. The Aztecs had no connection with South America. The Taraskins somehow did. We know from linguistic evidence and costume choice, some exchange of flora and fauna, and above all, in technology. The Tarasksons could smelt metal.

Like the Inca, they could smell copper, and they used that to form the points of their arrows, and their mast arches with their copper-tipped arrows were decimating the invading Aztec forces. So the exchange, if it had been on a broader scale between North and South, would have been potentially an equalizing force. If the Aztec had had llamas from South America, it would have been dramatically to their advantage. There is 10 in the New World. Yes. So no bronze? Why, whatever you're not got bronze from copper and tin?

They'd never made it. That's certainly not in Mesoamerica where everything was stone. They're the worst of both wells. They could smelt silver and gold to attract the greed of the Spaniards, but they couldn't smelt iron to hold them off. Right. Right, no, but before that, you would have thought that they would have done copper-ton, good bronze. They did have bronze in the Inker world. Oh, really? Okay.

And if the Aztecs had had access to that, again, they'd have given them a much more aggressive fighting stunt. Bronze can't stand up against iron, but it's better than stone. Right, yeah. Or obsidian. So this is, I think, an important part of what happens here, which is that the Europeans are learning from each other, but the natives are not learning from each other. Right. So Cortez learns from the conquest of Hispaniola. Of course, he has a ton of improvisation in the way he approaches the conquest of the Aztecs. And then Pizarro, you know, just knows the whole details of what Cortez did a decade earlier,

basically follow the same playbook. Yes. It's not clear to me that the Incas even knew the Aztecs existed. No. So you just have a much more accumulation of knowledge than the other one is able to accumulate. Yeah, they're closed worlds that were very much, very insular. in their societies. To go further back in time, I think the only divergence that would have given pre-Columbian

peoples a real long-term chance to hold off the Europeans, if we reversed the clock another 500 years back to leave Erickson and the Norse in Greenland, they knew of the existence of North America, Helloland, Markland, and Vinland, as they called them, as they explored them, and they tried to colonize the new world. Their numbers were too few, the local resistance was too few. and they were forced out. If the Vikings had been able to claim a long-term presence in the new world, they may have been able to drip feed European technology, European beasts of burden, and above all European diseases slowly into the Americas. So that 500 years later,

when the conquistadors did show up, they'd have met a people who had some resistance to European diseases, knew how to work iron and were riding horses. If that was the case, all bets are up. That would be such an interesting history. What does the new world look like if the Vikings that actually set up there. That's very interesting. What was Pizarro's greatest innovation on Cortez's strategy? I think essentially the key to what was following the blueprint as closely as possible. Go right to the top, establish a coastal sediment, which Cortez also was very invested in so you have a secure base to fall back to if what's happening in the interior is not playing out. A base on the coastline was originally with the conquist there was a more

broadly, the Portuguese, British, French subsequently, they would build those key strongholds on the coast, which, because of their monopoly over nautical technology, means they were effectively unable to be extricated by any local indigenous population. And that's one thing that people tend to underestimate with the success of European expansion. At the end of the day, they had the fortresses, right? And again, the long institutional knowledge of what a perfect fortress should look like. Those jagged-edged-edged star parametism and rivets and battlements which maximized firepower. Even Eurasian cultures, even the Qing Chinese struggle to be able to deal with that. The peoples of the pre-Columbian Americas had no real chance of storming defenses

on that kind of a scale. The Inca Aztecs, even didn't even have siege warfare. They didn't have siege weapons, battering rams, catapults, nothing like that. So once the Europeans dug into fortified positions. It was very hard to move them out of that. Pizarro's own environment was quite different from that of Corteur at the end. I mean, the highlands of Mexico are quite elevated, but the Andes mountains that the conquistadors were moving into. I mean, I've been at elevation in the Himalayas and I was struggling to breathe with the altitude sickness. So how they're able to move to those heights and then be able to fight battles is really astonishing. With many, you know, many, dozens of pounds of armor and equipment.

Yeah, it speaks to their physical stamina honed over many years of hard living and the core motivations. This better be worth it. So that's why Cortez and Pizarro were always kind of first among equals. They had to keep demonstrating success. They had to be the alpha dog in all circumstances because around them were many ambitious men, some of whom had titles or claims that were just. is legitimate as Cortezo Pizarro. And Cortez is always on top of that situation. Pizarro,

of course, at the end, lost control. He met his end as a rival faction storms his household. And he went down fighting not against the indigenous people, but against his fellow Spaniards. What I find interesting about these conquest is that once the emperor is captured Ottawaapa for the Incas and Magtizuma for the Aztecs, what is it that they think is going to happen? Why are they cooperating? What is the... in story in which they come out on top? Do they think that the Spanish were going to leave if they give them enough gold? What is their endgame there? That's a good question. I mean, I think Moctezuma the second, from the moment when Cortez seized him, because previously the records of

Moctezuma reflect that he was a pediless autocrat. He centralized all power on the aristocracy. Previously, it used to be possible to work up from outside the circle into the inner circle. But he forbade that. He was almost Stalinist. in his authority over his underlings. And he was the one who was amping up the ritualistic flower wars into successive campaigns of incircum and an annihilation for the Lashkarlens. So he was in every sense of the word, an autocrat. Perhaps it's for the first time in his life being told what to do just led to a complete

psychological break because once Cortez had hold of him, he seems to have pulled a complete 180 switch and become essentially willingly Cortez's puppet. He was always trying to do what Cortez wanted in a way that would still be beneficial for his people, but would not rock the boat so much in terms of Cortez's authority. In the end, it wasn't Cortez who disposed it was his own people because they realized that he had sold them out and he had to go. His being unilaterally deposed, that had never happened before. in Aztec history. He was the first Huey Latuanian to be reputed by his own people and replaced by someone else. But what it was in his own up? What did he think was going to happen? He seemed

like he had his wits about him, right? He did, and the Spanish accounts refer to that he had a regal bearing, was clearly intelligent. And he was adapted to the situation. He learned to speak Spanish very, very quickly. He learned to play cards and chess. Yeah. So he was, I think, trying to integrate himself as much as possible. At the same time, though, I think he was also reaching out to his own people, and he was waiting perhaps for his opportunity to fully mobilize him. Perhaps he just felt he never quite got the opportunity to do that, because bear in mind, the deal was if he provided Cortez, and he walked into that room and said, I can fill it up this high with gold and silver, and Pizarro would promise to be released at that point. Perhaps he actually

felt that this was a man of his word, but Pizarro in no case was and had him go out of death after getting what he wanted. So it may just be that he misinterpreted Pizarro as someone who was on the same level that kings don't do this to other kings, but he was dealing with a freebooting entrepreneur's pirate, essentially, not someone operating in good faith. Yeah. Okay, so zooming out,

it's sort of interesting to think about what this Spanish New World conquest really accomplished. So they're basically after gold and silver in a weird way, they're sort of like paper clippers who don't really care about this indigenous culture or even the productive capacity of this new continent. They just care about these metals, which are not in and of themselves productive assets, right? They can't generate wealth.

They're basically like crypto, if you think what gold and silver are. So they're just obsessed with this. Initially, we were talking about this yesterday. This helps them fund the, you know, Europe's in a tough spot at this time because the the Ottomans and other forces are, the reconquested as just happened. So the Spanish have been fighting off Arab armies that had control over parts of the Iberian Peninsula. And they use this gold and the silver to, I guess, help pay for the defenses back at home.

But if you think about what's really happening here, there's no new net wealth that has been generated, right? It's just basically redistribution among Europeans, where if they're using bullion as currency, now the relative ratio of bullion has changed. You get inflation plus some redistribution. It's basically the government printing more money. It doesn't create more stuff. There's no productive, at least initially,

the Spanish are not getting any new productive capacity out of the new world. What does change is that during this period, the Ming dynasty is in charge of China, and it has really messed up the circulation of paper currency. Nobody trusts it. Every time there's inflation, they just make up a new currency

and people's stocks of wealth are totally worthless. And so now the Spanish set up the silver mines in the new world, and they ship that silver off to China. And China is then sending millions of pieces of porcelain and tons and tons of silk and spices and fine goods to Europe. Basically hundreds of tons of real goods, I don't know if it might have been thousands of tons, in exchange for basically a medium of exchange, basically to make up for the fact that they don't have a reliable means of exchange at the time in the Ming Dynasty.

And I think that is an important, interesting piece of like, what is a function of the Spanish colonies in the new world? It's not generating any net new wealth. In the grand scheme of things, it's basically helping get, I don't know, Chinese stuff for free in some sense. Yeah, the conquistadors really didn't appreciate what they'd accomplished, many of them. Some of them died doing what they did. The ones who were lucky were good, lived long enough to settle down on what we're called in

commieenders, its local estates, with many of the local peoples to farm the land for them kind of peon served them. The later iteration was the bureaucrats. Once the conquistadors had cleared the ground, the bureaucrats would arrive from Spain, and they would begin running and administering what would become Mexico, Peru, South America generally. The conquistadors in South America rebelled against that, had to be put down by force to retain South America within the Spanish Empire. Once that was accomplished, though, the whole process became very integrated into the Spanish imperial orbit. The first empire, much the sun never sets. Once the Spanish had discovered and exploited a mountain of silver at Potosi, once now Bolivia, they put the last

piece and puzzle of the puzzle in place for true globalization. Initially, the gold silver was all going east, as you say, into the coffers of King Philip, the Fifth. and King Charles V and then his son, King Philip II, for their wars of evangelical defense and expansion against the Ottomans to keep the Netherlands under their control to ideally, through the Armada, bring the one true apostolic faith of Catholicism back to England. Most of those ventures, of course, were failures. And as you say, the net impact for Spain was ultimately quite negative, because by infusing Europe with this enormous expansion of liquidity through the silver,

that was pouring off the treasure ships every year arriving in Spain. All they were doing was importing inflation, pushing prices up to levels. And real wages in Spain actually fell during this period because, yes, there was excess liquidity, but this meant prices for even staple goods were much higher than they had been previously. And the ultimate negative effect was the seductive drug, essentially, of having silver on tap meant that Spain never developed towards what we call functional capitalism. It never developed capital markets or independent banking systems, the way that were emerging in places like the Netherlands

and England during this period. So those powers moved ahead while Spain and Portugal were left behind, didn't really fully industrialized during the 19th century, were left very rural and poor and backward by the 20th century. Still now, they're catching up from that. So the average Spanish gained from this was quite marginal. Yes, we can afford fleets necessary to face off against the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571, which is good, but in terms of the development of the society, that really plateaued and stayed that way for hundreds of years. The other side of the equation, as you mentioned, is China. Yes, once the Spanish had fully become able to exploit the silver mines of South America, they could then take advantage of their developing knowledge of the Pacific

oceans, wind currents, to send those great ships west to the Philippines, to Manila, their base in the Orient, and from there meet with merchants coming from Japan, from Siam, and most of all from China, bringing goods with real practical value for exchange for that extracted silver. So as you say, the Spanish are buying goods with value with a success liquidity, and the real benefit from that is not something that's structurally to the advantage of the country as a whole. So, yes, what the conquistadors did was historically put the last pieces of the puzzle in place for true globalization. Traders no longer trans-Eurasian or even transatlantic. It's trans-global.

The networks now affect everybody at some point along the line. And the Ming found that out in the mid-1640s when there was a cash crisis, having full. transferred the basis of exchange in their empire to silver. When access to silver was cut off, or at least minimized for a number of reasons during the first half of the 17th century, the Ming at the worst possible time with the Manchu at the gates could no longer fund their armies. They couldn't pay to put a military in place to hold them off. So the Manchu's moved in at a moment of supreme advantage, blew out the Meng and replaced them as the new hegemon's over the Chinese Imperial Zong.

Yeah. Is it just in the contrast to Spanish, who had immediate and outrageous successes in the New World with the English around the same time, we're setting up the colony in Virginia? And there's so many letters from that time where people are complaining about the Virginia company is just literally a waste of English money and... Lines. Yeah, exactly. And just like, everybody's dying. They're not getting...

There's like nothing to farm here. there's nothing to get out of this. In the long run, of course, I guess the British did lose control the new world, but for a while, they did gain these productive new colonies in a new world. And I don't know what to think about this. I mean, there is this way of thinking about

maybe the Spanish set up this extractive because they had this very quick initial success. They set up a very extractive settlement, which didn't result in net productive capacity in the long run, whereas the British were forced because there was no, you know, just like crazy bullion floating around. They were forced to build up some productive capacity, build up these kinds of institutions that would allow them to make most use of America, Canada, and so on.

Yeah. You look at the Netherlands and England. The two late comes to the game of imperialism, Protestant powers marginalized for that reason in Europe. And the Netherlands especially has nothing. Natural resources, absolutely zero. So in that environment, you're forced to innovate and think about how you can achieve capital gain and true economic expansion. Everybody wants the quick fix. Understand it.

We play the lottery for that exact reason, right? But be careful what you wish for them because you may just actually get it. And those societies that have arrived at the quick fix, whether that's gold or silver or monocultural crop production of some kind, which gives you a monopoly on its provision, they become satisfied. with that. They become trapped within an environment that exists solely for that purpose, and they don't develop beyond the essential thresholds that that allows for. Even here in the US, we can look at the difference between the north and the south. That geographic line, below that line, yes, you can get the quick fix. You can put all your capital into buying slaves and have them work at providing cash crops, which is tobacco, the original one,

indigo and sugar, and, of course, the big one, cotton. The North didn't have those advantages. You couldn't just buy land and then extract the resource from it. You had to think about how to make money. And that's why all the investment money in the North was going into things with long-term productivity, into trade and commerce, into advanced capital markets in the banking system, and, of course, into industrialization. That all happened in the North. So when the rupture came in the 1860s and the North and South went to war, all those

advantages were with the North, not just population, but the industrial base, the capital markets necessary for it to put in place a winning long-term strategy for actually defeating the South in that conflict. That again is the long-term lesson, that having life too easy from the beginning leads to a certain, I don't want to call a laziness, but lack of vision perhaps in alternatives that may in the longer term actually be more advantageous. So earlier in this episode, I asked Sy, if you could rerun the conquest a thousand times how often do the Spanish end up in control?

What if the Aztecs had learned ironworking from the Vikings, where the Spanish hadn't brought smallpox, or Cortez had died earlier? Obviously with history, counterfactuals are just thought experiments, but with software, you can actually test them. The antithesis software testing platform runs your system through thousands of parallel histories, letting you explore any counterfactual you want.

How does your software perform if a packet gets dropped? What about when the network directs, or the machine dies made of real, Right. Importantly, you don't have to come up with these counterfactuals. One big problem with traditional testing is that it only covers the distribution that you know. To test for a bug, you first have to imagine it. These tests are sort of like the Flower Wars. The ASEC success in these ritual battles against known rivals made them feel like the best

military in the world, but they're still unprepared for Cortez. Antithesis solves this by steering your tests for you, injecting faults and making things as adversarial as possible. way your software gets tested against scenarios you'd never imagine, but they could still arise in the real world. Go to antithesis.com slash Thor Cash to learn more. Going back to the Aztec Zincas, one thing that's remarkable here is just how bad their strategy and tactics often were. For example, because Aztec military conflict was based around capturing victims for sacrifice, there were many cases where Cortez himself was laying on the

ground and had been knocked off his horse, but instead of just killing him on the ground, and guarding their advantage, the Aztecs were trying to seize him to go have some sacrifice water and this allowed him to get himself out of the thorny situations. Another huge mistake that these would happen in these conflicts is that in the traditional way in which this military conflict would happen is that the general would be garnished and plumbed with all this extra, you know, decorations basically, which would make him easy to to identify in a battlefield. And if you have cavalry, I can just see, here's where the general is, let's go get,

go directly to him, kill him. The whole enemy force will route. It just makes your entire chain of command. You might have 100,000 troops, but then your general dies and everybody else routes. Another example, the Battle of Kusko, a couple hundred Spaniards defending against this huge rebellion. If the rebellion had just kept attacking at night, instead of only attacking your own day, The Spanish had never gotten a chance to rest and would have just been depleted pretty quickly.

But instead, they would let them rest at night. Wouldn't use their overwhelming numbers to do rotations that would attack at different times. Now, why I find this confusing is that it's not like the conquistadors arrived at the doorsteps of a bunch of peace-loving hippies who didn't know anything about war. Aztec society, because society was organized around warfare. All adult males were trained to be warriors. It was basically like the sparta of the new world, right? So how do we understand how a very military-focused culture did not have the strategic wherewithal

to do this improvisation that Cortez was doing improvisation, Pizarre was doing a bunch of improvisation, why weren't they able to do the same thing? There are a lot of factors, one of which is that cultural, the religious aspect to it. The warfare was rewarded by increase in status. The warriors would be recognized for bringing captives back to Tenosite land for sacrifice.

There was even like a hierarchy in terms of the prisoners, like that four Totonaks were worth one Chichimech, because the Chichimech were a wilder tribe to the north and fought more fiercely than Totonaks did. To a degree, there's a certain overlap with European cultures. There was great advantage throughout the feudal era in taking your enemies alive as opposed to killing them, because then you could ransom them back to their families

and you can come out of that ahead in terms of at least financial gain. In a way, the Aztec model is, it makes more sense because sacrificing your enemy means you'll never see him again, whereas selling your enemy back to his family means he's up for round two and you might face off against the same guy across the future battlefield. Even kings, the kings of France after the battles of Portier and Pavia were captured and then subject to various indignities. So to a degree there was a certain level of obelat, but more holistically, you're right. Yes, the Aztecs did fight ideally to capture not to kill.

There were multiple episodes when they did have Cortez himself under their knives, but was so desperate to haul him off. His compatriots sometimes sacrificing themselves were able to rescue him. So that was an aspect of their warfare ingrained in their culture and in their faith and the religious expression of the values of an entire people. Difficult to tilt that within the framework that we're talking about. I'd be asking people here, if we're fighting aliens from another planet, to give up Christianity because there's too much invested in terms of its morality and more effective of combat skills would be derived from following some other faith. It was not possible to reorient an entire society in that limited time frame to do that. The Cusco situation, we could, to use a famous film example, the movie 300. The Spartans are able to hold the pass of Thermopylae because

against overwhelming numbers, it's very, very narrow. And within Cusco, the surviving conquistadors fell back to two heavily fortified buildings with narrow entrances, and the streets of Cusco are quite narrow as well, which means that even those overwhelming numbers could only be channeled down through those narrow avenues, and those could be blocked relatively effectively, even by the small numbers of conquistadors, and their increasing numbers of Native allies, able to put in place with their metal armor blocking operations that could hold those kind of frameworks. Beyond that, when the pressure came off, then they would unleash their horses, largely through the wider plazas and then the surrounding countryside looking for isolated detachments to take

out. And this effect was demoralizing on the Inca. They initially had the advantage. They were rallied by Manco. We're going to deal with these barbarians once and for all. But as the frustration of the siege drags on, there's more and more defections, men slipping away at night either to switch sides or just go back to their homes and families. Again, this army is huge. Very diverse. And many of those recruits are peoples who've been subjugated and have no institutional loyalty to the Inca. The bottom line is they need to get home to their farms to get the harvest before the winter. The nature of warfare in the pre-Columbian America and Europe, for much of its history, was driven by the annual cycle of planting and harvesting the crops.

You need the men on their farms to do that because if they're not there, then you face a very hard year coming up if you don't have enough crops set aside to get you through the winter and the following year. So for all those reasons, the Inca, yes, where those huge numbers weren't able to really overwhelmingly apply them at the same time. If they'd caught perhaps the entire conquistair army marching through one of those mountain passes, yes, they may have been able to win a set piece battle in that environment. The horses can't charge up the steep slopes. Both ends, if they're blocked cleverly with boulders and went with trees, mean the infantry's not going anywhere either. You have them essentially pinned down.

All the advantages would have been useless. that point. Metal armor won't protect you from a two-ton boulder rumbling from the heights right into your face. If they've been able to arrange that, on small scales they were. But to get the entire conquist it was in one place at one time like that, that never happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, it was not enough time to accumulate the strategy. Again, it's that shockingly short, steep learning curve. It just wasn't enough time. Yeah. So in retrospect, you have these outrageous battles with, you know, thousands of debts on one side and zero debts on the other side. But my understanding is this came as a surprise of the conquistadors as well.

And so how were some hundred-odd men willing to go confront an empire of 10 million people and say, your job is to take this over? You know, it would be sort of like dropping 100 Marines into like 18th century England and being like, okay, you better come out the other end with control over parliament. How is this a thing that they were willing to do? The kind of classic push-pull factors. They came from a proud land, a new country, Spain, and we come together in 1492.

And they were aware their history was one of struggle, uniting the peninsula and consummating the reconquista. So they had a proud warrior background, but little to show for it, really. Again, the quality of life, particularly in extramedura, which is the province in Spain with so many of these conquist that I was originated from, was a land of hardship. It was small farms and dusty terrain and unproductive, and they were aware of a wider world around them, and as like so many men have throughout history. They see their only path forward as being anything more than dirt farmers is to seek a career of high risk and potential even fatal outcomes. but possible great reward as well.

Men have joined armies, militaries, fought in campaigns. Not even there aren't, even other peoples for many centuries millennia now, for that reason. And the attraction of the new world, once they're aware that out there is a whole new land where it's possible for even a small man like myself to become something, to become somebody. All I have as an asset is my fighting skills. And yeah, I could keep fighting in the campaigns against the Moors or against the Turks, but those are high-risk, low-return ventures. Yeah, I'll be fighting in my home waters,

but what will the potential rewards be? These Turks can fight, right? The message I'm getting from the far side of the Atlantic is the risks there are much lower, and the potential rewards much higher. It means traveling across the vast ocean. It means essentially being very self-reliant and falling in with men who are just as cutthroat as I am.

How important is religion and the morale of these soldiers? because in retrospect, we're like, okay, they were able to take on huge armies, but they didn't know, they didn't even know that there was an empire there to take over. They didn't know where its capital was. They'd never seen it before. They knew nothing about what are the alliances that they need to maneuver, what are the size of the armies we need to face, what is the basic terrain and geography that we need to navigate. And so I'm still trying to understand how they gain the confidence, you and your couple hundred

buddies, to go and take on a huge empire. I don't know, but do they just think God would make sure that they're okay? Yeah, how do I understand that? Cortez and Pizarro both had men of the cloth traveling with their expeditions to provide for their spiritual needs. And Cortez and Pizarro, in retrospect, would make a great deal of this in their writing. They were professed to be outraged, particularly by the Aztec cult of human sacrifice, which was integral to their society. I don't see any reason why that would be untrue.

I mean, it would be shocking to actually see that happen. And Cortez, Ramaktazuma, invited him to the top of one of the two great pyramids in Tenochtitland. He remarks the priests were daub from head to foot in black clay or body paint. And the interior was black with spilled blood and it stank of bomb-lably. So I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be genuinely mortified by that. And they would take a certain degree of legitimacy from tearing down the ancient idol, of these superstitious peoples and raising them up to the one true faith, you can solve your conscience in many ways by doing that.

Then in real terms, I'm here for what I can take, but I am performing the will of God, and therefore I have some absolution when I'm called to account at the end of the day. So men will sometimes seek to find a higher purpose in what are very low endeavors, which is what was playing out at that time. Again, in coming to the motivation, the initial conquest were relatively easy. The island populations in the Caribbean, what we now call Puerto Rico, and in Spaniola, Cuba, the peoples there were quite low on the tech tree, were not unified, did not have a significant military presence.

Of course, on islands, there's nowhere for them to run. You could run into the mountains of Cuba, but eventually they would all be hunted down. So the feeling was the pickings here are pretty easy, and the enthusiastic attitude was, well, why would it be any different in the mainland? Of course, they did run up against heavy fighting, and some of them would say afterwards, the veterans of wars against the Turks, this was some of the hardest fighting I've ever been through. But by that point, they'd seen that the potential reward are much higher as well. When they arrived at Lake Tishkoco, they would marvel as if we'd are just arrived in Atlantis, right?

To be in this place on this lake with these cities arranged around its edges and the biggest city of all, it appeared to be floating on the water like Venice, except even more dramatic with its high temples. To them, this both awed them and inflamed that greed that they had. And Cortez himself admitted as much to Mokhtazuma's envoy. He said, my man and I suffer from a disease of the heart that only gold can cure. So Mokazuma sent him feathered headdresses and all the traditional regalia. He sent him jade and obsidian, which in the Aztec world would have been symbols of great regard. And Cortez was happy to put on the headdress and he sent it back to the king.

But the little trinkets of gold that he was getting, that was the real end purpose. And the local peoples would talk about how the Spanish were chattering like monkeys as they were picking up these gold and were fascinated by it. Yeah. By the way, Bernal Diaz, who wrote, like, was on this Cortez's expedition and wrote a first-hand account, it would happen afterwards.

He basically says in his account that, basically in every single town we come across, even in small, outlying villages on the empire, every temple, every city, just has tons of human sacrifice remains left over. So this is just an endemic part of the society that I guess must have purified the Spanish. I mean, they weren't exactly,

it's hard to square any sort of humanitarian, even plausible motivation to the Spanish. They were just very willing. I think maybe even worse than almost any other European conquest ever, the Spanish in the new world, just massacre,

huge swats of innocent women and children, like the literal genocide, intentional genocide, not just disease. Yeah, crazy amounts of rape and assault. So there wasn't a sense of like we're freeing these people from the shackles of oppression, or at least there's no plausible story you could tell where there's, that's what you're doing. They would argue in the long term, this is in these people's interests, right? But of course in the short term, as you say, the accounts are unambiguous about this, throwing

men and women to those huge hunting dogs that they bought with them for sport to watch them being torn apart. They could rationalize that in Mesoamerica in reference to that cult of sacrifice, which was endemic, ingrained into the mentalities of those people. There were a regular cycle of sacrifice, and that would peak according to particular crises, major campaigns, or the like. There are accounts, again, these are distorted accounts, but an almost industrial level of human sacrifice, that the parade of presidents who've been drugged to keep them pacified, stretched from the pyramid complex all the way through to the causeways, one after the other, they'd be worn up to the top of the pyramids to the temple complex,

priests each would take an arm and a leg, well, a fifth one would use an obsidian blade to open incision and pull out the heart, which we offer to the gods. I've been to those pyramids, the ones are two to walk in. The steps leading up are very, very narrow. You almost have to walk up sideways, deliberately so, because when the heart had been taken out and burned, the body would be tumbled off the far side, and the steps were so steep to allow it to tumble all the way to the bottom. And then the warrior who'd taken that prisoner would then take the flesh home to be consumed. It was the consummation of his victory as a warrior to take on literally internalize the defeated enemy. So this was, as you say, it's a cycle that the world is better off with that.

I'm not going to make any excuses for it. But the motivations of those who did that, that was not selfless. It was at best a beneficial side effect, window dressing on a process of colonization and even literal genocide. And it had even less validation in South America because there was no such tradition at all. The Inca would very occasionally take a virgin sacrifice into the high mountains which should be drugged and you can still find the mummified corpses of these girls. But that was very rare and very specific. There was no ingrained culture of mass human sacrifice at all. Okay, here's a question I find very interesting. Why is it that the Spaniards are able to weaponize the divisions between the different native forces to their own advantage?

but the natives are not able to do the same with the Spaniards. So we know that the, there were significant divisions like the Spaniards, right? Literally, there's a whole much larger force that is sent over to arrest Cortez. Similarly, we didn't get into this much, but in the, in the, in the, in the, in Zara's expedition, his second in command, El Magro is pissed off that basically Fizarro is getting all the spoils. He comes back, lay siege to Cusco, after Manco Inka is late-staged to Kusko and captures it.

And so they were literally fighting, you know, in multiple cases, in both these expeditions, the Spanish are fighting each other while they are taking over a much larger empire. And why is it that the Manco Inka or Magdizuma are not able to use these divisions to their own advantage to stay in power?

That's a good question. The critical difference is this is happening for the conquistos within the Spanish orbit. They're all Castilians, they're all Spaniards, shared common backgrounds for most of them. And their confrontations were personal rivalries within their system. If confronted by an existential crisis to pit them against each other, I think that would have failed because their bottom line was. They would have united if they felt there was a common cause against them.

That would have forced them to do that. Whereas for the local peoples, these are differences between entire societies, both the external and internal factors here. Quitla Huac, who succeeded his brother, Mokhtizuma II, as Heuay Latuani. After driving the Spaniards out during La Nacche Trieste, he sent emissaries to the Lashkalans, to the Taraskins to build an expanded or new Triple Alliance to come together as native people with a common interest against these outsiders. And the Lashkalan, younger generation thought about it, but the old men who still retained power, who have been fighting against the Aztecs for decades and saw them as in the end, the existential threat, repudiated this possibility.

The Tarascan's wanted nothing to do with the Aztecs. No, we are enemies and always have been and always will be. This is your problem, and maybe you'll get taken out, no loss to us. So they couldn't overcome the kind of institutional hostilities, which go way, way back through their history. The only way that the indigenous people could have played the same game, and to a degree this did happen later, was to play different European people. powers off against each other. But of course the problem for the Aztecs, for the Inca, was the Spanish were the only game in town. They were the only outsiders they'd encountered. If the English, French, Dutch, even the Ottomans had been players in New World colonization at that very early

stage, it may have been possible for local peoples to identify, okay, these are different cultures. We can play them off against them to our advantage. That may have been the game, but at that time it wasn't possible. Now, we should talk about the, I know you spent a little bit of time thinking about the, what happened in all these other episodes of colonialism as well. Why, so in India, for example, we do have many different European powers. And why was it not possible for the Mughals to play them off each other indefinitely to keep control over India? The Mughal, I mean, it peaked under Orangir at the beginning of the 18th century.

Subsequently, his successes didn't have, whatever you called, the authority, the charisma, the Riz, where you want to find it, to maintain that hegemony, which he'd established by almost taking over all of India. And the Mughals always at root had the same problem that the Manchu did when they conquered the Ming in the 17th century. And they built the Qing Dynasty, China, the greatest physical extent it ever had. But they were always outsiders. They were not indigenous to the population. In the background, there was always that vague resentment that were being ruled here by foreigners. And that was okay while they were going from success. to success, but when the momentum halts and it begins to roll backwards, that's when the local

power brokers begin to feel to themselves, maybe we have more to gain from breaking away from the empire than we do from remaining within it. So both Mughal India and Manchu, China, had that kind of fatal defect, as it were, coded into the ultimate basis for their authority. So even without the Europeans, I think the Mughal Empire would have peaked, and it would would have disintegrated. Now, what would have happened next would be more like a patchwork quilt of different authorities, some larger, some smaller, the Maratha Confederacy, I think would have been a major player, but not one that could incorporate the entire subcontinent within its authority. And of course, we look at Chinese history. It's the constant cycle of the rise of a dynasty,

its peak, its decline into anarchy, and then the rise of a new imperial hegemon in the region. So that cycle would play out, I think regardless of whether the Europeans intervened. Specifically in terms of why the British took over at the end, well, in the bluntest terms, the Royal Navy rules the waves. And in terms of projecting power, the Brits were able to force the French out of Canada and out of India because they controlled the sea lanes and although the French had, in terms of population, military, a larger force. If you can't project that force, it's really of no value to you.

So this is very interesting because it makes sense why the British could have been one of the major powers in India, where, you know, there's the Maratas, there's the, you know, there's the remainder of the Mughal Empire, there's many other factions, and then there's this British outposts, they've gotten rid of the French, you know, the British that have got Bengal. Why is it that they were able to consolidate, where nobody else is able to consolidate? And I think one hypothesis here is that we often talk about advantages in technology, but we don't talk about advantages in sort of governance or in terms of organization. And the Eastern Attorney Company was like a company. It had a board.

I could fire and hire CEOs and lieutenants and whatever. It wasn't called the CEO, obviously. And so it wasn't necessarily like the most competent people who were in charge of the Eastern attorney company. They were they, like, pretty competent people, Robert Clive and his underlings. And you would have instances in, for example, I think the Navab of Bengal, right before the British are able to gain control of Bengal, which is the initial tax base that they set up in order to further their conquest.

Oliver de Kahn is I consider it to be a pretty good ruler who was able to hold the British at bay and stuff. And then he dies and his prince is this like kind of crazy psychopathic guy who doesn't listen to advice and so forth. So because there's this like monarchical tradition across all these principalities in India, there's just going to be sooner or later a bad king. And that king cannot stop, will not be able to stop the British incursion. they might even lose people there's also all these forces around these principalities where like who are going to lend money to who are we going to like lend our troops to and they realize there's a bad king right now the British seem

pretty competent I'm going to make an alliance with the British instead and similarly with the case of the Azic Sniakas maybe even more so the overwhelming majority of the troops forces that the British are using are Indians right sea boys yeah seapoys. So I think this is an underrated thing of just being able to delegate competent people and they're like being able to replace them one after another if they get killed or if they resign or something. There's not going to be some crazy succession crisis that creates this anarchy that then somebody else can swoop in and take control. Absolutely. Just to get one example, the British were winning the 100 years war because the king of France, Charles VI, was insane. He was

convinced he was made out of glass, for example. And then the English lost the 100 years war because their king, Henry the 6th, was insane. He would just shut down months at a time. Mentally, he just couldn't function. In non-democratic environments, yes, the corporations, for the reasons you outlined, profit-driven and therefore not loyal to bloodlines or any other kind of extraneous circumstances, but just looking for the most competent leadership and a capacity to exchange and replace people are much more flexible than those kind of hierarchical states. Even in many ways you could argue in democratic societies, the corporations can still maneuver them because they're untied to particular loyalties, and it's just that brand awareness

that they're trying to push. The British and Dutch were late to the game of imperialism, and you wouldn't give them much a chance given the differentials, but they unleashed the power of the free market. As you say, the East India Company, the English and Dutch equivalents, the British Hudson's Bay Company, which is really what made Canada, as we understand it today. Those corporations, driven by those motives acting with almost plenty of potentialry powers at vast distances, had the flexibility on the ground to take advantage of local circumstances to insert themselves into diplomatic arrangements, which have persisted for centuries with all the accumulated grievances. Here, we're the fresh newcomers. We have, obviously, skills of what we do,

as you say, taking control of the tax revenue of Bengal effectively took control of the entire political orbit. What can you do without taxation? Reorient that towards the shareholders, force the local people to stop producing these crops, even if it means million staff to death, in order to produce opium to take advantage of that is, it was devastating in its impact in political structures that had no real environment where that was part of their established traditions. And even the conquistadors, even the Vikings, we go back far enough. These were business operations.

The Vikings would be men who would assemble with what weapons they had enough capital up front to pay for boats, to go raiding, to make this profitable by looting churches and monasteries. That's what the conquistadors were. were. They were freebooters operating within a capitalist system. These were not desperadoes are the lowest of the low. Many of them had some education. A lot of them were Hidalgos, which is the lowest rung of the petty nobility in Castile, who inherited titles and attitudes, but not much assets beyond what they could put up as soldiers of fortunes. They call themselves Campaneros, which is colleagues or companions, not soldiers. So this whole operation was, if you like, the most

raw unbridled capitalism in its finest, pulling assets to derive enormous profits from very risky ventures. Maybe to close us off, the thing I find very remarkable in the story is we've talked about how lopsided these battles have been, how quickly this conquest proceeded. In the grand scheme of things, the technological advantages that the conquistadors had over these empires are not that shockingly big, right? As you mentioned, guns at these time are not good enough to actually be that helpful during battle. So it's basically horses and it's steel weapons. In fact, I think, I don't know we've talked about this, but towards the ends of these conquests or the middle of these conquests, the metal is weighing them down and it's really hot and stuff. So they're

even like receding to the cotton armor that the natives are using. So it's not even the armor. It's really just that they had better, like, you know, metal swords instead of obsidian obsidian blades and that they had horses. And that's enough to, let a couple hundred men take over entire empires. I, you know, you can draw analogies to what might happen in the future. We don't even have to go there. I just, I just find it sort of remarkable that, yeah, how little it took for them to be so dominant. They could win battles. They could not have won the war, though, at the end, without the support of those indigenous allies. So, so those of warming numbers. Yes, actually, they're right. They would always keep their helmets to protect the head,

but many of them were ditching the metal armor in favor of the local stuff because that was good enough as protection against local weapons. They would not have done that and carried it back to Europe. That would have made them too vulnerable. But here, you adapt to the circumstances. You have more freedom of mobility. It's less exhausting wearing cotton than it is two-wear metal. So they would make that adaptation.

They would even sometimes for very prized allies, again, as a way of integrating them into the Spanish coalition, is provide them like local chiefs and warlords with Spanish weapons, just to emphasize that you're so special to me. And this was effective in binding them together. And they were very, very clever in identifying the local sub-chiefs beneath the Aztec layer of authority who would be receptive to the idea of why are you taking orders from them when you get a better deal from us. They knew, for example, the Aztec Empire was called the Triple Alliance because it was set up in 1428 by the first Shui Latawani as a coalition between the three city states, Teresh Tietland, Tishoko, and to Cuba. In 1516, so like two years, three years before, Cortez arrived in Mesoamerica, the chief of,

or king of Tishko died and his two sons fought a civil war for who would succeed him. Mokshuzauma stepped in and gave the title to one of those brothers. So what does the other brother do when the Spanish show up? He immediately sides with them to get within his own family. His own family was on both sides of this war. This is his path to getting what he feels is his due, being the king of Tishoko. And in the broader sense, if I'm under the Spanish versus under the Aztecs, maybe these newcomers will give me a better deal.

So there was that seductive quality at the elite level. Now, what they didn't understand was so many of them thinking they were using the Spanish to their advantage. They didn't appreciate the numbers in which the Spanish and later Europeans would arrive. Their closed worlds didn't allow them to think about people from such fast distances could come in such huge numbers. that in the end, as happened in, for example, Australia and New Zealand, that will become the minority in our own country. The demographic tide they didn't appreciate in the long term

would work fundamentally against them. Yeah. Okay, so the analogy to AI, they're so obvious it's not worth spelling out. But I think that's actually an excellent place to close. This is such a bizarre, shocking, and interesting part of human history. And I appreciate you coming on and telling us all about it. Real pleasure. Thank you for having me.